So much for resolutions...I've been as bad as ever about posting. But it's been kind of a busy time and I have some photos to prove it. Got through Christmas and decided I don't want to spend another holiday season here. It's too weird to be in a hot dry place that is so unfestive. Also, many of the volunteers go away at that time of year as well as staff so it's like the whole program shuts down for a month. I found it very grim. It's funny because at my last job January was also really slow. I didn't mind it so much then but at least I made projects for myself. December and January are truly slow here -trainings seem so far away it's hard to do any planning. The picture above is of an area of Ghana right next to Kpalime, Togo - around 2 hours from Lome (except there's a border crossing that takes forever). I went for a weekend in mid-January with a group of women who take a yoga class here with an instructor whose husband is connected to the American Embassy. She arranged for us to stay at a very basic lodge in this slightly mountainous region of Ghana and do yoga and hiking. How great is that? Two things I really love to do and someone else made all the arrangements! It was a wonderful break. We also went swimming in a small, cool pool at the base of a waterfall after a pretty strenuous hike (the trails here are not all that developed). It felt heavenly, though.
As you can see!
We also went to a nearby village where kente cloth is woven in strips like this. Everyone weaves - men, women and children. All the women were away at a funeral, though, so we saw a lot of untended looms with a few men and boys weaving in the village.
Hillary Clinton came to speak to the President of Togo (Togo is now on the Security Council at the UN and she had been in Liberia for the inauguration of the new president there). She stopped in at the embassy for 8 minutes (someone actually timed it), giving a brief speech and shaking the hands of everyone there (probably 75 people), including me. I have pictures to prove it but they're on my work computer. She's clearly a fast worker.
A few weekends ago the CLO (community liaison officer), Becky, here on the right, arranged for an artisan (3rd from right) to come to the embassy to show a bunch of us how to batik. Here we are with our creations. It was tremendously fun and I hope to get the chance to do it again.
Here's my cute dog who is mostly very sweet and I love having him. I think he thinks I'm pretty boring (I don't run around much) but he's adjusting to my schedule. He sleeps when I read, go on the internet, etc. He's been with me exactly 2 months today.So I'm coming home in 5 weeks for 2 weeks. Looking forward to that but since I made the decision to leave Togo after December it doesn't seem quite as pressing. I feel like the end is kind of in sight and I know what to expect from the rest of the year. We will have only one group of trainees this year coming in early July but it will be a much bigger group that each one last year (40 as opposed to 23). It will make for a different kind of training experience for sure. I just got back from 4 days visiting new volunteers at their sites and seeing them has given me ideas about changing the training we do. That is probably the most interesting part of the job - doing the training myself and then seeing later what they do or do not retain. It helps me to figure out what to stress more the next time around. I enjoyed seeing the volunteers at their various posts - many are in fairly remote small villages (which is more what I think of when I think of Peace Corps volunteers) but some in are large houses in small cities. There's quite a variation among the posts here.
The thing that has struck me about Togo lately is that it seems not to change much compared with what we are used to in the US. The climate is the same pretty much all the time - the gradations are too subtle for me to appreciate. The differences between the dry season and the rainy season, the hot season and the not so hot season are not that easy to get a feel for and so every day seems the same really. I wonder what it is like to have always lived in a place where everyday is the same weatherwise and lightwise. I never realized how sensitive I was to the changing seasons and light but being here has underscored the need I have on a gut level to have those changes. But even beyond that, when traveling particularly outside of Lome, I get the sense that the people living in the other parts of Togo live pretty much as they have always lived, that there is no expectation that their lives would, could or even should be different. The volunteers talk about their villages being motivated or not - it's hard to see where they'd get even an idea that things could be different when they look around and see the unchangingness. There are certainly aspects of Togo that would improve with change - the scores of malnourished children that can be seen in many villages, the lack of sanitation, the hand to mouth poverty. But I look at the groups of women that gather with their children on their backs, the groups of children playing together after school and the community interaction you can see easily in any village and sometimes, the simplicity of life here doesn't seem so bad. And I wonder, as a American, what exactly we have that we want to impart to Togo.
